More than 100 UK lawmakers signed a letter to the Chinese ambassador on Tuesday condemning oppression of the Uyghur community by the Chinese government and demanding an end to the abuse.
In the open letter signed by Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh and co-signed by 130 cross-party MPs and peers, they described the Chinese actions as “a systematic and calculated program of ethnic cleansing against the Uighur people.”
They said: “When the world is presented with such overwhelming evidence of gross human rights abuses, nobody can turn a blind eye,” said the cross-party letter, which was signed by 130 lawmakers.
They said that nobody can turn a blind eye when the world is presented with such overwhelming evidence of gross human rights abuses. “We as Parliamentarians in the United Kingdom write to express our absolute condemnation of this oppression and call for it to end immediately.”
The lawmakers also referred to the video footage, which was recently shown to Chinese Ambassador Liu Xiaoming during a BBC interview, in which “a large number of people blindfolded, kneeling and shaven, waiting to be loaded onto trains.” They said, “the similarities between this video and historical footage of Nazi concentration camps are truly chilling.”
The Chinese Communist Party is exerting increasing pressure and tyranny towards the Muslim communities, especially Uighur Turks, as a result of economic, political and geopolitical interests in those regions.
In July, Uighur Turks and other Muslim communities in China have asked the United Nations and other international organisations to put pressure on China and investigate the acts of genocide perpetrated against the Uighurs.
A report titled “Genocide in East Turkistan” holds China responsible and says that despite the Covid 19 pandemic, the Chinese government continues its oppression and persecution of Uighur Turks and other Muslim communities for its own political and economic interests.
The report says that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) systematically continues to pressure and torture Uighurs to force them to assimilate and then destroys them.
“The Beijing Administration breached the “Prevention of Genocide” contract which was signed and approved by them before the international community,” the report said.
“As such, the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Secretary, Chen Quanguo, and other executives are all responsible and accountable for these crimes,” the report said.
Another crime committed by the Chinese Communist Party is the forced transfer of people from East Turkistan into proper China to work in forced labour facilities. Just as the Nazis forced Jews to work, Uighurs are sent to work in factories with uniforms similar to prisoners.
The ‘Uighurs for Sale’ report prepared by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute contains striking information. In the report, it was revealed that more than 80,000 Uighurs were taken from the camps and sent to the factories to produce goods for globally renowned Western companies, such as Nike, GAP and Apple.
The unconfirmed statistics put that number to over 500 companies.
Also Read-British PM sets Oct 15 as deadline